6 Sexist Video Game Problems Even Bigger Than the Breasts

Some video games are more obviously focused on women's genitals than a gynecologist exam. In games like TERA, a woman's armor is a map of her erogenous zones, defending her from only the most technical definition of nudity. Dead or Alive uses more computer power to model Kasumi's breasts than NASA had for the moon landings. That's actually not a joke.

TecmoAnd the results deal with similar levels of gravitational attraction.

But there are even more sexist structures in video games than the armor. Even though that armor often looks like someone trying to lasso twin zeppelins.

Namco Bandai GamesOne self-exam and she'll explode.

The physical character design can obviously be sexist -- in fact, that's usually its entire job -- but often it's the narrative structures that wrap the player in a matrix of sexism, and these are six of the most common.

#6. Daddy Issues

Naughty Dog

Some recent games have featured independent, well-developed characters with amazing powers, intriguing pasts, and mental off-switches activated by ball sweat. It's like the player has kryptonite testicles. BioShock Infinite's Elizabeth was born with the ability to tear portals in time and space, then learned to pick locks anyway, then sat patiently in prison until a penis arrived to save her. Ellie from The Last of Us is immune to an apocalyptic virus, learns new weapons faster than Neo, and has stabbed more enemies to death than Wolverine. But as soon as the guy turns up, she dissolves into tears and nursing. She could be machetifying a rapist cannibal into sashimi, but if the hero arrives she'll instantly collapse into helpless tears, safe in his arms. Because that's exactly what happens.

Naughty Dog

Naughty Dog"There there ... it's OK, Y chromosome is here."

The protagonists, on the other hand, are such anonymous manly men that we're not even going to bother with their names. You already know they're white, stubbly, grizzled, dark-haired gun platforms. Their only advantages are the magic balls that fix them as the center of any narrative universe. And they've already lost their own girl earlier, because why on Earth would a man care about a woman without prior cause? The woman's struggle becomes a stand-in for the man's loss, her entire narrative is just a piece of his, and he scribbles "Daddy makes it all better" all over her ending.

Naughty Dog"I love you, dad ex machina."

There are father-daughter relationships that work because the daughters in questions are actually children. For example, Clementine is not equipped to cope with the horrors of the zombie apocalypse in The Walking Dead. The Little Sisters of BioShock 2 need a literal Big Daddy to protect them from rampaging splicers. But if the woman can already rip holes in reality and/or enemy sternums, maybe they should have a character dynamic other than "Save me!"

#5. The Damsel

Nintendo

The damsel in distress has been thoroughly covered in Anita Sarkeesian's infamous Tropes vs. Women videos, but in case you missed those, the damsel is the character captured just so the dude can save her. The bad guy bursts into her life, destroying everything he sees and carrying her away, then he abuses and tortures her just so some dude can put his courage to the test to come save her, often in an attempt to reclaim her as some sort of love prize or symbolic victory. This often involves the same kind of "smash everything and carry the woman" technique utilized by the villain in the first place, but it's OK, because it's your turn this time! The woman is passed back and forth like a football and you're trying to get into the end zone.

Figurative end zone.

A character is a damsel if she can be replaced by an inanimate object without any changes to the plot. Mario could just as easily have been trying to grab a golden pipe wrench, or find a gas mask so that he doesn't hallucinate so badly when clearing blocked sewage lines in the pharmaceutical animal-testing lab. The reason they're problematic (note: that's the classy, grown-up way of saying "fucked up") is because this trope is technically about the capture of a woman, but evolves to be about the man, and the woman becomes a plot device to get him through a glory-filled narrative.

In over a dozen Zelda games, Zelda has only helped Link save her a couple of times. The games are named after her, but she might as well be a key card in a dress, something he needs to grab to win. Except key cards perform a function in the game.

Nintendo"I wish he'd hurry up. I'm running out of House episodes to replay in my head."

There's nothing wrong with a hero-rescue tale, but it doesn't always have to be boy saves girl. The days when superior physical strength defined who did what ended the instant we created virtual worlds disconnected from reality. If you can teleport by playing the ocarina, you don't need testosterone to swing a sword.

An alternative view is presented in Hope: The Other Side of Adventure. This free mobile game takes five minutes each day to make you the captured princess awaiting the arrival of her prince. It's short, shocking, heartbreaking, and most importantly annoying. The entire time I wanted to shake her so that she could find a way to pay her own bills and say her own name, and that's the point. The damsel in distress is a frustrating gendered trope that needs 100 ccs of Destiny's Child, stat.

#4. The Dominant Turns Submissive

Nintendo

Growing up I had two ass-kicking female role models I wanted to be: Samus Aran and Lara Croft. (Sorry, Eleanor Roosevelt, but you should have killed a zombie or something if you wanted to leave an impact on me.) Lara Croft and Samus Aran were the queens of gaming. Lara might have moved every ounce of her body fat into her breasts, but she was still an intellectually and physically capable character bringing twin handguns to every ass-kicking. Samus Aran was a tank that could somersault and explode everything underneath before she landed. The fact that her gender surprised so many people at the end of the first Metroid should have started us on the road to fixing these gender problems over 20 years ago.

Nintendo"Master who?"

Instead, recent reboots have treated them like unsaved files: wiping out everything people spent ages developing, replacing them with blank templates, and filling us with rage. The Tomb Raider reboot reduced Lara to a puddle of tears. Every time she cried, missed a jump (and then cried), or killed a person in self-defense (followed by crying), I wanted Laura Mulvey to spoon me and tell me everything was going to be all right. I get that it's an "origin" story, before Lara became badass, but when we saw young Indiana Jones at the start of the Last Crusade, it wasn't extended shots of him weeping and trying to wipe a snotty nose on his leather coat.

The developers said they wanted the players to care for Lara and protect her. Horseshit. I didn't want to protect her, I wanted to smack her and tell her to get her shit together. Also, imagine applying that to Halo's Master Chief. Or nursing teenage Duke Nukem through his crippling insecurities. Why can't we celebrate her as a competent professional tested by unexpected situations? You know, like every male character ever?

We never see the scene where Duke realizes his chauvinism is due to high school bullying.

Other M replaced Samus, the most badass bounty hunter in gaming, with doe eyes and daddy issues. She's single-handedly exterminated invasive species and exploded entire planets, but now she'll stand in lava and burn to death before switching on her own shields without permission from Commander Fatherfigure, who calls her "lady." The story was so staggeringly sexist that even Team Ninja, the group behind the Dead or Alive sports game where women with breasts larger than their volleyballs go on dates with you for voyeur photography, announced "Woah, that wasn't us!"

Nintendo"Tee-hee."

What's even more infuriating in Other M is Samus responding to a distress signal from an infant Metroid that she calls The Baby. She has guilt over The Baby. She believes The Baby was crying for her. She feels that The Baby enhanced her abilities. The Baby. The Baby. The Baby. The Fucking Baby.

Because that's how all women think, right? Early Metroid games had a maternal aspect, with a hatchling Metroid saving Samus' life, but that was subtle. To picture how badly Other M ruins it, replace all of Ellen Ripley's dialogue in Alien with constant rape whistle.